He’s sent a lot of telepathic messages lately—he’d spent many Tuesdays in a row at Lars’s house, with no sight of his mother—and none of them have worked. But now things are different. He’s no longer at Lars’s house, where the walls were made of thick, gray cement and probably didn’t let any messages through. Now he’s in a house with paintings on the walls where his mother is going to meet him. Why else would Lars’s mom have taken him all the way here, on an airplane and a train and in the back of a yellow car, unless this was where his mother was going to meet him? It was the only thing that made sense.
Plus, it’s Tuesday, the day his mom always picks him up. He knows its Tuesday because he heard the lady at the laundry place say so, when he went there with Marge this morning. It’s only Tuesday and I’m exhausted, the woman had said, finally in Spanish words he could understand. Thank you, God, he had thought. Because sure, Tuesdays were his least favorite day because his mother left him for a little while. But they were also his favorite, because when his mother came to pick him up he felt more happiness than he ever felt at any other time, the kind of happiness that made him actually jump. As if the ground couldn’t handle his happiness. As if he had to give the ground a little break.
The lady who’s taking care of him while James and Marge are gone is painting her fingernails with pink and then clear and it smells like poison. Julian doesn’t really like her, just like he didn’t really like Sofie, Lars’s mom. He doesn’t really like anyone who’s not his mother. And why should he have to? He watches the slow clock. The sun is going down like a big ball somewhere, but Julian can’t see it, only feel it. Finally he hears some keys; James is home, with a mean face on.
Julian’s least favorite thing is when a face looks mean. This can be the face itself (lines in the wrong places, a mouth like a hole), or something that happened to the face (James’s puffy cheeks and reddish-blackish eyes). Sometimes his father’s face would look mean without anything happening to it. But only sometimes.
James tells the lady, who now has pink fingernails, something and she gets up to leave, which scares Julian because he does not want to be alone in the house with James’s mean face. In his mind, he draws with his imaginary pen: a face that doesn’t look mean, a face that doesn’t look mean, a face that doesn’t look mean. James says nothing, rubs Julian’s head, puts a pack of peas on his eyes, bleeds from his mouth.
When Marge gets home right afterward, she has a line in the middle of her forehead like a worry. She’s carrying many bags and her hair’s messed up. Julian has seen his mother look like this before. He hadn’t liked it then: the person who’s supposed to take care of him, out of control. He doesn’t like it now.
But it doesn’t matter that James and Marge look mean and worried, he tells himself. Or that they are yelling at each other in the other room now, or that Marge’s eyes look like almost-crying. It doesn’t matter because he is leaving. His mother is coming for him. Just watch the clock and be patient like an alligator.
Be patient like an alligator. He wants to ask his mother why she always says it. Why is an alligator patient? He’ll ask her when she comes. When she knocks. Three times like a pow wow wow. Three times like a nice face. Three times like a voodoo spell that brings mothers directly to sons, like gifts. She’s here.
He rushes to the door. He soars like a bird with air under its wings toward the knocks.
Marge leans over him, tugs on the knob. Latches squeak and hinges sing for his mother. She’s here. She’s just like he remembers her: feet, legs, dress. He grasps the legs, which make a backward L with the feet. The legs laugh. It is not his mother’s laugh.
He looks up.
It is not his mother’s dress: his mother doesn’t have a dress with fish on it.
He feels a cry like a train moving up through his body. When he opens his mouth, it comes roaring out, loud enough for his mother, wherever she is, to hear him, to come running. He gets the feeling that the cry won’t stop, not ever, not until she’s here. He sees James coming for him: the meanest most broken face in the world.
On James’s Running List of Worries: that his face is broken; that Raul Engales’s only remaining hand is broken; that his marriage is broken; and soon, if this child’s cry does not come to an end, the collective ear of the neighborhood will be broken. He wants to fix it. He wants to be the glue for once. He wants to collect the pieces of his marriage and his face and Marge’s face and Raul Engales’s hand and fix it.
Marge: scooping up Julian and rocking him to silence. Simultaneously dealing with this woman—who is she?—Don’t worry about it, Marge says repeatedly, but the woman lingers. Should James intervene? But how might he? The space near Marge is off-limits, this she has made clear. He stands paralyzed in the living room as the red-haired woman pushes her way into their home. She stands, booted feet apart, in front of the mantel.
“No fuckin’ shit!” she says, in a distinctly New York accent. “You’ve got one of Raul’s pieces in here? Right here in the middle of all these big shots?”
“Sorry, who are you?” James says.
“Name’s Arlene,” she says. “I bumped into your wife. Today. But before, too. On New Year’s. I always meant to check up on you, you know. Never knew where to call.” Her gaze lands on Julian, her eyes engorging with the manic wideness that the childless used on children, either to seem unthreatening or to disguise that they themselves are threatened. “Well, look at this little adorable person. Why so sad? Huh, little adorable person? I am new. You gotta get used to people, right?” The lady scrunches Julian’s wet, teary face in her hand.
James knocks a quick glance over at Marge, evaluates her. She’s holding Julian like a baby and looking right at him, her eyes saying: It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it, he agrees. He gives her what he hopes is a comforting nod.
He sees the scene from Arlene’s eyes. He is a father, with his family. With his wife, her bangs, their boy. They are not rich enough for airplane trips but can rent a car and go to Maine. They have dinner out, once a week, maybe Tuesdays. They take baths, all three of them, crowded into the little city tub. They go to the park and watch the roller skaters. They find beauty in the small parts of life. They find beauty in one another. It’s all they need.
He sees the life from his own eyes: a crying boy whom he did not father, a woman he loves who has revoked reciprocation, a room full of paintings he doesn’t deserve. His face is swollen into what feels like one enormous lump. There are no sensations, no colors, no smells—perhaps Engales had punched them all right out of him, stealing them back as quickly as he had given them in the first place. There is just a room full of things he loves that don’t want to love him back. He feels suddenly and deeply exhausted.
“I’m selling it,” he says, perhaps too softly for anyone to hear.
The room goes blank and quiet. Then, at the same moment, both Marge and Arlene say: “You’re what?”
“I’m selling it. I’m selling that painting you’re looking at, Arlene, because it is a no-good piece of shit that has ruined my life. And I am selling the one next to it because a guy gave it to me for free at a garage sale even though it’s worth fifteen thousand dollars and I was too much of an asshole to tell him, even though I knew precisely how badly I was ripping him off. And I’m selling that one there, the Nan Goldin picture, because even though I was the one to discover Nan Goldin, I found that picture in a goddamned Dumpster outside her studio. That one there I bought entirely with Marge’s money, and that one I bought with what was supposed to be my share of the rent. I didn’t earn any of this. I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve you, Marge. But you do deserve my help. Now if you’ll excuse me,” he says, feeling stirred up and dizzy now, “I’m going to call Winona.”
James walks into the kitchen, where there is a red phone mounted to their white wall. A phone that, even if it doesn’t fix everything, will at least free him from it. He imagines the walls with nothing on them, a clean sweep. From the living room he hears
Arlene’s flummoxed voice. “Does he mean Winona George?” He knows Marge won’t answer. He knows Marge like the top of his own foot. He knows Marge like he knows his Hockney painting and his Kligman, and his Engales. She will be quiet now, letting the lie that the boy is theirs sink into her, soften, sweeten, stop . . . no, keep going. Arlene is insistent: “Winona the rich lady? With the hair?” James dials a number he now knows by heart.
Winona is ecstatic. Has wanted her paws on this collection for years. Already has it all planned: they’ll do it at the new spot, the first show in the new space, in December, yes, the perfect festive nip before all the festive nips. Have Warren come down to hang it, do a few olives, a nice Chard. She’ll wear her leather pants. OH FUCK YES: HER LEATHER PANTS. Phenomenal. It will be phenomenal, James, you just wait. Everyone who’s anyone will be there. We’ll sell every last thing, I’ll bet my boob job on it. It will be gone before you can say surrealism three times, James. You won’t have to worry about a thing.
Ooh! The sunset is insane tonight, James. Have you been outside? I’m on my roof, James. On the cordless. You heard about these things? NO CORDS. It breaks up sometimes—can you hear me, James? Yes? You can’t see it? Oh, it is quite the thing. Orange and pink, smeared all over the river like a goddamned painting. I guess that’s the problem with sunsets, though, right? You can’t keep them. Sigh. Maybe that’s why they’re beautiful, though? Are you still there, James? The cordless. Because we can’t keep them?
“Fuck sunsets,” James says flatly, just as Winona sees that much-coveted green flash. She knows it’s a mirage—refraction, is what they call it—but she’ll take it. She loves nothing more on this earth than fleeting beauty.
THERE’S NOTHING TO BE DONE ABOUT THE LOVE
November is the color of the outside of an eggplant. It smells like the inside of an old woman’s jewelry box. Get outta bed, you’d want to tell November if you saw it. Do something. Winter nudges at the city with its cold shoulder. The edges of windows become shores of chill. Cashmere emerges. Wool, not yet. The month lumbers, as if half-asleep. It’s waiting. It knows. November is a month that knows. It knows that hearts everywhere are about to break; happens this time every year.
Marge and James circle each other in their little house, like animals who haven’t met. James wags for attention, panders; Marge sniffs. Their voices shake when they say certain words: Julian, strawberry, home. Marge could leave at any minute. She doesn’t. Marge will leave when Julian is gone. Or else she won’t. They kiss once, after dinner, when both of them feel like crying. They sleep separately. Julian cries nightly, like a ritual. To fix it, give Julian a pen and paper; he’ll quiet down, then draw forever. James tacks Julian’s drawings up on the wall like substitutes for his paintings, which have been taken down, wrapped in plastic, stacked against the wall by the door. In some ways but not all, it works.
The drawing is just one of the things they’ve learned about Julian from the letter they’d had translated by Mrs. Consuelo the dry cleaner. Other things: he’s almost six years old, with a birthday in February. Smart for his age; no English. His mother’s in trouble. Raul Engales is his only hope.
They have exactly four weeks until Engales is let out of the Rising Sun. James hadn’t wanted to press charges, but Spinoza had called the cops anyway; they’d let him off the hook, with good behavior, if he stayed at the Rising Sun for another month. This knowledge has been obtained via Lupa, who has thought to call James’s house from her own, where, she says almost sadly, she is cooking soup for everyone. For four weeks, though, Julian is theirs.
Movies show at 8:00 P.M. on Sundays. Engales watches romantic comedies, regular comedies, horrors. Another movie plays in his head: his sister standing above a boy. Rewind. His sister standing above a boy. Rewind. His sister standing above a boy. Back in his room, he watches the girl across the street pull off her shirt again, look directly into his eyes. She has found him. He presses his body up against the glass: his hand, his jeans, his tongue.
A group of mothers meets in a badly lit room. There is a wilting balloon in the corner that reads Happy One-Oh. Someone’s brought coffee in a thick thermos, but no one drinks it. They hold their hands like little personal knots in front of them on the table. We still have everywhere east of A, the mother in the red beret says. We’ve been looking for months now, the mother in the black, large-shouldered jacket says. What’s that supposed to mean? says the mother in the emerald terry-cloth robe. She hasn’t taken off the robe since July. She won’t take it off until he’s found, one year and seventeen days from now, crammed into the sideboards of a SoHo basement, his backpack the most alive thing about him.
At the Museum of Natural History, Julian points up to the big blue whale. Marge holds his hand; James can see the tightness of her grip from the other side of the room. The light in the room is as blue as the whale, not because James’s mind is making it so, but only because the museum’s lit it that way: a false oceanic depth.
James thinks about how Leonardo da Vinci painted using aerial perspective, which was based on the idea that the atmosphere absorbed certain colors. Objects that were closer to the painter always had more blue in them. Objects that were farther away, less blue.
It doesn’t matter, he thinks now, whether he’s close or far from the things he loves most in the world. He’s screwed. They all are. Marge has fallen in love with the boy. He can see it in the way she is using her arms. It’s as obvious as the giant mammal that hangs above them. That’s the thing about love, he thinks. There’s nothing to be done about it.
At Part Deux, the abandoned Chinese market on Grand Street where the members of the squat have taken up residence, a line has been drawn. Literally: Selma Saint Regis has drawn a chalk line, in a circle around her body, on the gnarling floorboards. “I’ll sit inside this circle until they force me out,” she says. “And if Reagan wins, I’ll refuse to eat.” She’s practically hysterical, hasn’t eaten anything real in days. “Shhh,” says Toby, who grabs her under the armpits, pulls her up, drags her out of the circle and into their makeshift bed. “It’ll never last,” she says to Toby. “Nothing does,” says Toby. “Not this,” she says. “Us.” Toby nods solemnly. Nothing does, nothing does.
Lucy approaches a tall woman with a name tag that reads: SPINOZA. Spinoza wags a finger that’s as big as the fake dicks in the porn shop under Jamie’s house. “Na ah ah!” Spinoza says: a power tattle. “Nobody sees Raul Engales anymore. Nobody can see that man at this point in time—he’s got a month left at least. The law. And to think I fired one of my best nurses ’cause of him.” Spinoza smacks her jaw. Lucy drifts back out onto East Seventh Street. Across the way, the empty squat complains: I haven’t had any fun in weeks. She knows how it feels. She goes back to Jamie’s, where she’s reassumed her old position as the good girl of the house. She takes a shower, runs her hands over the rusting tiles. Uses a lotion that smells like lavender. Still feels dirty. She hasn’t been the good girl of the house for as long as she can remember. She touches her own hands, thinks of her mother for a long time.
“I’m pretending,” says Marge, to her coffee.
“I know,” says James, to his bleeding eggs. The sky outside is the color of sky.
“That it’s not going to end,” Marge says.
“I know,” James says.
The eggs make James think of Franca, a person he has never met and never will, whose letter Marge had translated by the lady at the Laundromat, whose translation had made him cry.
The sky, when he looks up and out the window, makes him think of the man he was supposed to be but never will.
A truck double-parks on Jane Street, prompts honks from a line of impatient cabbies. Its mouth yawns open in lazy anticipation of a life’s worth of art.
PART SIX
MINUS ANY GOD
If there was such a thing as a mixture of snow and fog, it was what was present on the day of Engales’s release from the Rising Sun: the second Tuesday in December. He had been tucked
away, in one brightly colored, airless room or another, for almost two months now, which made the air out here feel even denser with moisture, as if the city itself were one giant cloud. He couldn’t help wondering, as he emerged into the free, chilled universe, if this could perhaps be a dream. Or if all of it had been, his whole life, maybe.
He stood on the stoop of the Rising Sun with a small sack containing things Darcy had given him as parting gifts—a set of playing cards and a poster, rolled up, of an exotic woman in a bikini drinking a bottle of Jim Beam. He was wearing one of Darcy’s suits, which he had won in a breakneck game of Loba de Menos, though Darcy would have given it to him anyway. Darcy had liked Engales from the beginning, and became even more invested in him when he heard the saga of his sister’s son; he’d had a son once himself, Darcy explained, though Engales did not dare ask why he no longer did. “Go find that boy,” Darcy had said when he handed over the obsessively pressed suit: gray, with white pinstripes. “Go find that boy and look good for that boy and tell that boy he’s loved.”
That had been Engales’s plan, not that he had another option. He couldn’t not find Franca’s boy. He couldn’t not take care of him. He had spent every moment of the last month thinking about him: while he attempted alphabets with his left hand—he was fairly competent with it now—and while Debbie kissed his neck in the physical-therapy room, and while he played cards with Darcy during social hour. Thoughts of the boy had become the focus of his very limited universe. What would his hair look like? Would he have Franca’s teeth? Would he be shy and funny, like Franca was? Or bold and brash, like Engales was? Or worst: Would he be spineless and annoying, like Pascal? Engales had played out whole scenes in his head: Franca showing up in New York and the two of them taking the boy to Central Park, or, more realistically and yet less appealing, the same Central Park excursion with Lucy.
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